Archival Program Information
For current Research Institute events, please see The Getty Event Calendar

Conversation

James B. and Barbara Byrnes at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, ca. 1952. Photo courtesy of Barbara and James B. Byrnes.

Thursday, February 6, 2003
7:30 p.m.
Harold M. Williams Auditorium

The Getty Research Institute invites leading figures of the postwar art world to engage in conversation about the key artists, exhibitions, and movements that developed in Los Angeles in the late 1940s. Museum professionals Walter Hopps, Henry Hopkins, and James Byrnes, and artist Frederick Hammersley will address topics such as Cold War era hostility toward modern art in L.A., the establishment of educational programs that created a collector and exhibition network in the Southern California region, and how these guests themselves helped shaped the strong culture of museums, galleries, and art schools that we recognize in L.A. today. The discussion will be moderated by Thomas Crow, director of the Getty Research Institute.

James B. Byrnes was the first curator of modern and contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1946-1952). He later directed the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art in New Orleans.

Frederick Hammersley is one of the "Four Abstract Classicists" who originated hard-edge painting. Hammersley went on to become one of the leading abstract painters in Southern California in the postwar period.

Henry Hopkins was a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 1961 to 1968 and director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1973 to 1986. From 1994 to 1998 he directed the UCLA Hammer Museum and he is professor emeritus of the art department at UCLA.

Walter Hopps cofounded the pivotal Ferus Gallery, which opened in Los Angeles in 1957. He has held the directorship of the Pasadena Art Museum and the Corcoran Gallery. He is director emeritus of the Menil Collection in Houston and adjunct senior curator of twentieth-century art at the Guggenheim Museum.